EU lashes Israel over E1
JERUSALEM – Israel responded angrily this week to a European Union move to limit its agreements with the Jewish State to the country’s pre-1967 borders.
A meeting of the EU’s council on Monday concluded that “all agreements between the State of Israel and the European Union must unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”.
The conclusion was prompted by Jerusalem’s announcement of new settlement building, including in the E1 area next to Maaleh Adumim, in response to the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations.
At Monday’s meeting, the EU council also declared itself “deeply dismayed by and strongly opposes Israeli plans to expand settlements … and in particular plans to develop the E1 area”. The E1 plan, it claimed, “would seriously undermine the prospects of a negotiated resolution of the conflict”.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry hit back with a statement declaring that “Israel regrets the one-sided wording of the EU Foreign Affairs Council conclusions. Facts and history both prove that Jewish settlement never constituted an obstacle to peace. Therefore, the EU’s focus on this issue is mistaken.
“The root cause of the absence of a peace accord is the Palestinian refusal to engage in direct negotiations and their unwillingness to recognise Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people … This one-sided position taken by the EU rewards rejectionism and does not contribute to promoting a permanent peace agreement.”
A day before the EU meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out against international pressure to withdraw from settlements. “We are not prepared to repeat the same mistake of a unilateral withdrawal and withdrawals that, in effect, led Hamas to take control of Gaza.” He said that he will “rebuff the pressure to bring Gaza into every home in Israel”.
After the EU meeting, in settlements, leaders fumed. “A few hundred kilometres from here in Syria people are being massacred and in Iran nuclear weapons are being built, yet what bothers and shocks the world is a few hundred houses,” Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella organisation for settlers, told The AJN. “It’s completely irrational,” he said, adding that the EU’s position is “a gross misunderstanding of the situation in the Middle East”.
In addition to condemning Israel’s settlement building, the EU Foreign Affairs Council issued a warning to the Palestinians regarding how they use their newly upgraded status at the UN.
“The European Union calls on the Palestinian leadership to use constructively this new status and not to undertake steps which would deepen the lack of trust and lead further away from a negotiated solution,” it stated.
NATHAN JEFFAY
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